Description: Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there have been many, some of them major, industrial disasters in various parts of the world. Many were associated with mining activities that are inherently dangerous. Some were associated with the growing chemical industry. Some were linked with the transportation or storage of dangerous products. Some resulted from the interaction of industrial activity with natural phenomena. <break>Regulations have tried to reduce the number of accidents. But regulations create some costs and have always been resisted by the regulated, and by more libertarian governments that give more importance to economic and employment growth than to safety. The chapter describes some of these accidents, which resulted in significant deaths or property destruction.

Is economic development a prerequisite for concern over environmental issues? The existing literature has yet to reach an empirical consensus on this question. To revisit this important topic, we offer new experimental evidence by conducting online survey experiments in one developed country (the United States) and one developing country (India). We investigate how providing information on the negative environmental costs of foreign direct investment (FDI) affects people’s support of FDI, and how these effects differ between residents of the United States and India. The results of our experiment show that among residents of the United States, being presented with information about the environmental costs of FDI sharply reduces support for FDI, while a substantially weaker effect of the environmental costs of FDI was observed among residents of India. Also, respondents from the United States are more concerned about environmental damage caused by FDI in their own city than in a distant location, while this pattern is not observed among respondents from India. These results are consistent with the claim that economic prosperity and wealth are prerequisites for environmental concern.